You're dealing with an LLP, not a company. Here's what the register shows

The invoice says LLP. You went to check them the way you would check a company, and half the fields you expected are missing. No shareholders. No AOC-4. No MGT-7. A number called “total obligation of contribution” that you have never seen before.

An LLP is a different animal, governed by a different statute, filing different forms. Most of what people know about checking Indian companies transfers across. The bits that do not transfer are exactly the bits that matter.

There are more of them than you think, and they look healthier

On the register as we last read it, more than 550,000 entities carry an LLP identifier rather than a 21-character company CIN. That is about one in seven of everything on the register.

And they present very differently:

	LLPs	Companies
Active	90.35%	67.24%
Strike Off	8.51%	28.57%
Under process of striking off	0.19%	0.85%

Nine in ten LLPs are Active against roughly two in three companies. Before you conclude that LLPs are better run, note the obvious confounder: the form is much younger. The LLP Act came into force in 2009, so there is no cohort of 1990s LLPs sitting on the register having quietly stopped filing two decades ago. Companies have that history and LLPs do not.

The form is also growing fast. LLP registrations in the snapshot run 50,982 in 2023, 64,725 in 2024 and 86,707 in 2025, with 49,950 already recorded for 2026 by the eighth of September. Whoever you are dealing with, the odds that it is an LLP rather than a private limited company are rising every year.

For how the whole register breaks down, we have written up how many companies in India actually still exist.

The free layer, and what the fields mean

MCA publishes LLP master data the same way it publishes company master data: free, under MCA Services. You search by name or by LLPIN, the LLP’s identifier, which is short and alphanumeric rather than the 21-character CIN a company carries.

What you get:

Field	What it tells you
LLPIN	The stable identifier. Use it, not the name
Status	Same vocabulary as companies: Active, Strike Off, Under process of striking off
Date of incorporation	How long it has existed
Registered office	State, and the address
Total obligation of contribution	The partners’ committed contribution
Designated partners	The individuals legally answerable for compliance

Two of those need translating.

“Total obligation of contribution” is not paid-up capital. In a company, paid-up capital is money shareholders actually put in. In an LLP, contribution is what the partners have agreed to contribute under the LLP agreement, and it can be committed rather than paid, and it can include things that are not cash. Read it as a stated commitment, not as a bank balance.

“Designated partners” are not all the partners. An LLP must have at least two designated partners, and they are the ones who carry the compliance obligations and hold a DPIN. There can be other partners who are not designated, and the master data does not necessarily give you the full partner list. If you want everyone, you need the annual return.

The two filings, and which one is worth reading

An LLP files two things a year, and they are not the ones a company files.

Form 11, the annual return, under rule 25. Section 35(1) requires it “within sixty days of closure of its financial year”. It covers the year ended the previous 31 March, and it is where the partner list lives, along with contribution details and the LLP’s own summary of itself.

Form 8, the Statement of Account and Solvency, under rule 24. Rule 24(4) sets the deadline at “thirty days from the end of six months of the financial year” to which it relates. This is the financial one. It carries the statement of assets and liabilities, the income and expenditure, and, distinctively, a declaration by the designated partners about whether the LLP is able to pay its debts as they fall due.

That solvency declaration is the most interesting single thing in the LLP filing regime and almost nobody looks at it. A company’s directors make no equivalent standalone public declaration. Here two named individuals put their signatures to a statement about solvency, annually, on a public file.

Neither deadline is written as a calendar date. Both are counted from the close of the financial year, which section 2(1)(l) fixes at 1 April to 31 March, and 30 May and 30 October are the arithmetic rather than the rule. That matters for a young LLP: one incorporated after 30 September may run its first financial year to the 31 March of the following year, so its first due dates will not fall where you expect.

Note the asymmetry too. Form 11 lands in May and Form 8 in October, so the identity information and the financial information reach the register five months apart. If you check in June, the partner list is current and the accounts are a year and a half old.

The gap that matters most: most LLP accounts are not audited

This is the difference that changes how you read the numbers.

Section 34(4) of the LLP Act 2008 sends the question to the rules, and rule 24(8) of the LLP Rules 2009 frames it as an exemption rather than a requirement:

The accounts of every limited liability partnership shall be audited in accordance with these rules: Provided that a limited liability partnership whose turnover does not exceed, in any financial year, forty lakh rupees, or whose contribution does not exceed twenty-five lakh rupees shall not be required to get its accounts audited

Read it carefully, because the “or” sits inside the exemption and that inverts the usual summary. On the literal wording, an LLP escapes audit if either test is satisfied, which means audit bites only where turnover exceeds ₹40 lakh and contribution exceeds ₹25 lakh. Most practitioners apply the stricter reading, that crossing either threshold triggers an audit, and we could find no MCA circular resolving it. The drafting is genuinely ambiguous and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

What is not ambiguous is the consequence for you as a reader. A large number of small LLPs file accounts that nobody independent has checked, and where the figures are unaudited they were prepared and signed by the designated partners themselves.

For a small company, an auditor has at least looked. For a small LLP, the figures on the public record are the partners’ own. That is not a reason to disbelieve them. It is a reason to weight them differently, and to lean harder on the things that are not self-reported: the status, the filing history, and whether anyone has registered a charge.

What is the same as a company

Usefully, quite a lot.

Strike off works the same way from outside. An LLP that stops filing gets removed, and the status field says so in the same words, so what each status means reads across unchanged. So does the two-minute check on whether an entity is real.

Charges are on the same register. MCA’s index of charges accepts an LLPIN as well as a CIN, so you can check for nothing whether a lender has a registered claim over the LLP’s assets.

Documents come through the same door. View Public Documents covers Company/LLP alike, with the same seven-day window, the same three-hour download clock and the same .OCT archives. The full route through the portal applies unchanged.

Late filing is expensive, in two separate ways. Since the LLP (Amendment) Rules 2022, in force from 1 April 2022, the additional fee for a late form is graded by how late it is and by whether the LLP is a small LLP, running from one times the normal fee for a fortnight’s delay up to fifty times beyond a year. Separately, sections 34(5) and 35(2) impose a penalty of ₹100 for each day the failure continues, capped at ₹1 lakh for the LLP and ₹50,000 for each designated partner. The amount matters less than the direction: a multi-year gap is a decision somebody took while two meters were running.

What the LLP record will not tell you

Who really controls it. The LLP agreement governs profit shares, voting, and management rights, and it is not a public document. Two partners with equal contribution can have entirely unequal say, and you cannot see it.

What each partner is worth to you. Liability in an LLP is limited, which is the point of the form. A partner’s personal assets are not standing behind the LLP’s debts in the way they would in an ordinary partnership.

Whether the numbers were checked. See above, and check the thresholds before you trust a figure.

And it is a record, not the truth. Filings lag. A partner can leave months before the register catches up.

How to check one, in order

1. Get the exact name and the LLPIN, from the agreement or the invoice.
2. Look up master data. Status, date of incorporation, contribution, designated partners. Free.
3. Check the index of charges using the LLPIN. Free.
4. Check whether Form 11 and Form 8 were filed for the last two years. A gap here is the loudest free signal you will get.
5. Retrieve Form 8 if the amount at stake justifies it, and read the solvency declaration as well as the numbers.
6. Ask whether the accounts were audited. For a small LLP, assume not until you see otherwise.
7. Write down what you found and when.

The short version: an LLP is easier to check than a company for existence and status, and harder to check for substance. Free layer first, Form 8 second, and read the numbers knowing who signed them.

If you would rather have the filings than the fields, what a retrieval covers is the same for an LLP as for a company.

Written by the Entiva team, who read Indian company and LLP filings for a living. Not legal advice.